Culturally sensitive museum curation has been adopted in many countries in recent years, as a result of the efforts of Indigenous peoples seeking to regain responsibility for caring for and interpreting their cultural heritage, much of which had been lost to collectors and museums.
This approach recognises the authority of alternative knowledge systems, religious perspectives and customary laws of traditional owners, and affords artefacts care and respect according to status.
The Museum Association's Code of Ethics for Museums urges museum staff to 'involve originating communities, wherever practical'. This may include 'restricting access to certain specified items, particularly those of ceremonial or religious importance, where unrestricted access may cause offence or distress to actual or cultural descendants'.
The handling and visual inspection may be limited on the grounds of gender or religious status to elders, priests or ceremonialists and selected curatorial staff.
Not everyone agrees. In an article in the New Statesman in July 2005, entitled The Censoring of our Museums, Tiffany Jenkins, from the Institute of Ideas, condemned the Museums Association's Code of Ethics as 'terrible guidelines'.
She argued that restricting access 'sends out the insidious message that human beings can understand cultures only if they were born or raised in them' and that 'there should be no restrictions on the pursuit of intellectual inquiry'.
But if curators understand the nature of another religion, they should know and respect the protocols. Limiting access shows respect and reflects awareness that there is more than one approach to knowledge management and dissemination.
Modern standards for ethical research, which today underlie good practice in the social sciences, demand that research is only undertaken with informed consent of participants.
Staff in Australian museums, for example, observe Indigenous Australian cultural protocols of gender-based access restrictions by discouraging female researchers seeking to examine men's restricted material and directing them to address their research proposals to traditional owners.
If we insist on publicly displaying restricted religious items, even if it offends, or unilaterally allowing female researchers to have free access to restricted male ceremonial items (or vice versa), we are acting in an imperious manner and demonstrating a lack of understanding of their function and significance.
In the Museum Victoria, Australia, labelled but locked cabinet drawers have been used to raise questions concerning the appropriateness of viewing human remains and the ethics of their presence in museums.
In the Field Museum in Chicago, the removal of kachina masks from a Native American exhibition was used to explain the sacred nature of the masks for Pueblo people. Such strategies can convey cultural significance more evocatively than words, or conventional ethnographic displays.
In her article, Jenkins remonstrated that 'Museum directors must not act as priests', and 'idolatry has no place in museum policy'. The MA's Code of Ethics does not ask that museum staff perform the roles of priests or perform rituals, but the guidelines do ask that staff respect the beliefs and protocols of different faith groups and observe any protocols demanded by the status or significance of certain objects.
The respectful treatment of religious, ceremonial and sacred objects should not be mistaken for the act of worship. In museums in New Zealand it is not uncommon for museum staff, Pakeha (non-Maori) as well Maori, to place a piece of green foliage in front of Maori artefacts or taonga.
This is not an act of ritual, but a gesture of respect by museum staff who understand the nature of the objects, rather than seeing them merely as objects of academic interest. Some museum ethnographers are invited by traditional owners to participate in ceremonies, undertake initiation, or have ceremonial rights transferred to them.
Participant observation is an accepted ethnographic research method that enables curators to gain greater insights into artefacts and associated cultural practices.
But more importantly, such privileges arise from building close relationships with traditional owners for whom the curator, as custodian of ceremonial objects, is part of the socio-cultural framework of relationships and activities associated with those objects. Museums may allow priests or other qualified individuals to perform ceremonies in storerooms and galleries.
Visitors are not asked to perform rituals, although public programmes may invite them to observe organised rituals, which can further enhance their understanding of the meaning of objects and their relationships to people.
Culturally appropriate museology is also an active form of preservation. Museums are not just concerned with preserving objects of material culture or tangible heritage, but have broader concerns that include communicating their cultural integrity and aspects of culture that give them meaning: the intangible heritage - knowledge, skills, practices, and expressions of culture such as ceremonies, songs, stories and dances.
Understanding and observing cultural protocols gives greater meaning to objects by emphasising the contexts in which objects were used, and the relationships between objects and peoples; the performance of rituals and ceremonies associated with artefacts helps preserve intangible heritage.
The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC (NMAI), works with Native American priests and ceremonialists who regularly perform rituals. This is seen as preserving and perpetuating 'living culture', a central philosophy of the NMAI.
In some faiths, the spiritual domain is ever-present and for some the veneration of a religious icon can take place wherever it is encountered, so visitors to a museum or art gallery may respond reverently when they encounter a shrine, an article of faith or an object that they hold sacred.
For other visitors, it can be both moving and informative to enter an art exhibition and witness a Buddhist monk praying in front of a statue of Buddha, or observe a Hindu visitor making an offering at a shrine.
This conveys the reverence in which the objects are held by believers of that faith far more potently than exhibition text can. Similar insights are gained by visitors to museums that house operational religious or ceremonial structures, such as Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand, which houses a Maori marae that is used for ceremonial events.
While Jenkins contends that 'the writers of [the MA's] ethical code forget how important it is to be able to overturn old orthodoxies', this is exactly what the MA code and others like it are doing. Failure to respect the religious views and values of other faiths was a central ideology of European colonial expansion.
Government agents, missionaries and teachers condemned other religions as idolatrous and, in their efforts to Christianise and 'civilise' colonised peoples, they tried to eradicate traditional religious practices, destroying or confiscating religious artefacts.
Sacred and ceremonial objects acquired by museums were then interpreted within a western framework and placed within an ethnographic classification, curatorial narrative, or art-historical context.
The different and separate religions and cultures of the world are a reality, a fact that we should celebrate and seek to preserve in the face of the homogenising trends of globalisation.
To perpetuate the exclusionary practices of a museum profession dominated by western viewpoints would result in significant losses to knowledge and humankind. These old orthodoxies are now being overturned: cross-cultural collaboration, sensitivity and understanding are fundamental to modern ethnomuseology.
Moira Simpson is the author of Making Representations: Museums in the post-colonial Era and Museums and Repatriation. She is currently researching developments in culturally appropriate museology and Indigenous models of museums at Flinders University in South Australia
This approach recognises the authority of alternative knowledge systems, religious perspectives and customary laws of traditional owners, and affords artefacts care and respect according to status.
The Museum Association's Code of Ethics for Museums urges museum staff to 'involve originating communities, wherever practical'. This may include 'restricting access to certain specified items, particularly those of ceremonial or religious importance, where unrestricted access may cause offence or distress to actual or cultural descendants'.
The handling and visual inspection may be limited on the grounds of gender or religious status to elders, priests or ceremonialists and selected curatorial staff.
Not everyone agrees. In an article in the New Statesman in July 2005, entitled The Censoring of our Museums, Tiffany Jenkins, from the Institute of Ideas, condemned the Museums Association's Code of Ethics as 'terrible guidelines'.
She argued that restricting access 'sends out the insidious message that human beings can understand cultures only if they were born or raised in them' and that 'there should be no restrictions on the pursuit of intellectual inquiry'.
But if curators understand the nature of another religion, they should know and respect the protocols. Limiting access shows respect and reflects awareness that there is more than one approach to knowledge management and dissemination.
Modern standards for ethical research, which today underlie good practice in the social sciences, demand that research is only undertaken with informed consent of participants.
Staff in Australian museums, for example, observe Indigenous Australian cultural protocols of gender-based access restrictions by discouraging female researchers seeking to examine men's restricted material and directing them to address their research proposals to traditional owners.
If we insist on publicly displaying restricted religious items, even if it offends, or unilaterally allowing female researchers to have free access to restricted male ceremonial items (or vice versa), we are acting in an imperious manner and demonstrating a lack of understanding of their function and significance.
In the Museum Victoria, Australia, labelled but locked cabinet drawers have been used to raise questions concerning the appropriateness of viewing human remains and the ethics of their presence in museums.
In the Field Museum in Chicago, the removal of kachina masks from a Native American exhibition was used to explain the sacred nature of the masks for Pueblo people. Such strategies can convey cultural significance more evocatively than words, or conventional ethnographic displays.
In her article, Jenkins remonstrated that 'Museum directors must not act as priests', and 'idolatry has no place in museum policy'. The MA's Code of Ethics does not ask that museum staff perform the roles of priests or perform rituals, but the guidelines do ask that staff respect the beliefs and protocols of different faith groups and observe any protocols demanded by the status or significance of certain objects.
The respectful treatment of religious, ceremonial and sacred objects should not be mistaken for the act of worship. In museums in New Zealand it is not uncommon for museum staff, Pakeha (non-Maori) as well Maori, to place a piece of green foliage in front of Maori artefacts or taonga.
This is not an act of ritual, but a gesture of respect by museum staff who understand the nature of the objects, rather than seeing them merely as objects of academic interest. Some museum ethnographers are invited by traditional owners to participate in ceremonies, undertake initiation, or have ceremonial rights transferred to them.
Participant observation is an accepted ethnographic research method that enables curators to gain greater insights into artefacts and associated cultural practices.
But more importantly, such privileges arise from building close relationships with traditional owners for whom the curator, as custodian of ceremonial objects, is part of the socio-cultural framework of relationships and activities associated with those objects. Museums may allow priests or other qualified individuals to perform ceremonies in storerooms and galleries.
Visitors are not asked to perform rituals, although public programmes may invite them to observe organised rituals, which can further enhance their understanding of the meaning of objects and their relationships to people.
Culturally appropriate museology is also an active form of preservation. Museums are not just concerned with preserving objects of material culture or tangible heritage, but have broader concerns that include communicating their cultural integrity and aspects of culture that give them meaning: the intangible heritage - knowledge, skills, practices, and expressions of culture such as ceremonies, songs, stories and dances.
Understanding and observing cultural protocols gives greater meaning to objects by emphasising the contexts in which objects were used, and the relationships between objects and peoples; the performance of rituals and ceremonies associated with artefacts helps preserve intangible heritage.
The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC (NMAI), works with Native American priests and ceremonialists who regularly perform rituals. This is seen as preserving and perpetuating 'living culture', a central philosophy of the NMAI.
In some faiths, the spiritual domain is ever-present and for some the veneration of a religious icon can take place wherever it is encountered, so visitors to a museum or art gallery may respond reverently when they encounter a shrine, an article of faith or an object that they hold sacred.
For other visitors, it can be both moving and informative to enter an art exhibition and witness a Buddhist monk praying in front of a statue of Buddha, or observe a Hindu visitor making an offering at a shrine.
This conveys the reverence in which the objects are held by believers of that faith far more potently than exhibition text can. Similar insights are gained by visitors to museums that house operational religious or ceremonial structures, such as Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand, which houses a Maori marae that is used for ceremonial events.
While Jenkins contends that 'the writers of [the MA's] ethical code forget how important it is to be able to overturn old orthodoxies', this is exactly what the MA code and others like it are doing. Failure to respect the religious views and values of other faiths was a central ideology of European colonial expansion.
Government agents, missionaries and teachers condemned other religions as idolatrous and, in their efforts to Christianise and 'civilise' colonised peoples, they tried to eradicate traditional religious practices, destroying or confiscating religious artefacts.
Sacred and ceremonial objects acquired by museums were then interpreted within a western framework and placed within an ethnographic classification, curatorial narrative, or art-historical context.
The different and separate religions and cultures of the world are a reality, a fact that we should celebrate and seek to preserve in the face of the homogenising trends of globalisation.
To perpetuate the exclusionary practices of a museum profession dominated by western viewpoints would result in significant losses to knowledge and humankind. These old orthodoxies are now being overturned: cross-cultural collaboration, sensitivity and understanding are fundamental to modern ethnomuseology.
Moira Simpson is the author of Making Representations: Museums in the post-colonial Era and Museums and Repatriation. She is currently researching developments in culturally appropriate museology and Indigenous models of museums at Flinders University in South Australia
